Medieval Christians defended scripture inerrancy by appealing to disagreeing communities’ textual agreement.

Evidence

In the final section of De seta Machometi Martí argues against the charge of falsification. He bases his argument almost exclusively on the Koran, citing at length Koranic praise for the Torah and Gospels. To the charge that the Scriptures were falsified after the composition of the Koran, Martí argues that this would be impossible: Jews and Christians of different languages all over the world agree on the text of the Torah; how could they have contrived, he asks (echoing the Risâlat al-Kindî), to delete the name of Muhammad from their text? The same argument applies to charges of Christians’ wilful corruption of the Gospels. Here Martí uses an analogy with the Koran: just as Muslims recognize the incorruptness of the Koran and the impossibility for anyone to change the text without it being known, so too is it impossible to imagine the wilful changing of the text of the Gospels. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1207

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how arguments are built — the textual-agreement argument resembles modern consensus-based knowledge claims, and the cross-community agreement argument is essentially an early version of C. S. Lewis’s ‘mere Christianity’ style appeal to shared tradition.